The ALTO Facility in Orsay

The Institute of Nuclear Physics at Orsay (IPN-Orsay) has always been a major player in building accelerators for nuclear physics. Already at the time when the first synchrocyclotron had been built at CERN, IPN-Orsay had been operating and exploiting its first accelerator (a synchrotron that had been built by Frederic Joliot and around which the institute was founded). During the 1990s the phasing out of two of the IPN accelerators, the heavy-ion Linac + cyclotron system ALICE and the proton synchrocyclotron, was done timely with GANIL reaching its full performances. IPN Orsay was and still is a key player both during the construction and the exploitation of GANIL facilities. Later on and after building and delivering the superconducting cyclotron AGOR to KVI, the institute started a steady R&D program on ISOL production techniques, which is a long-standing tradition of the institute. It is for instance worth reminding that ISOL techniques were extensively developed at the synchrocyclotron of Orsay during the early 1960s and into the end of the 1990s with an important impact on what has been achieved during decades at ISOLDE-CERN. This recent rebirth of the ISOL R&D activity at IPN has inspired the ALTO project.